Brandon, was there a moment when you were working at your desk, and you thought, “Yep, I’m gonna be able to pull this off”?
When I wrote some of the climactic moments for the various books, because as you mentioned, it did get split into three. I didn’t expand his outline; I just wrote it as-is, and the decision to split was the publisher’s, but it was a good decision. There was a moment in writing that first one that I did where one of the characters has just a moment of complete clarity and transformation where I said “Wow, I think this is gonna work. I really think that people are gonna accept this. I think I hit it.”
Yeah, that must have been a great moment, that break-through moment. Did you know you’d had it then, or was it looking back that you realized, that’s the moment when you had the vibe?
Well, I felt I had it then, but I’m an artist, and you work with a lot of artists; you know that when the moment is done, when we’re done writing, we take our hands off the keyboard, our immediate thoughts are of panic and, everyone’s going to hate this, and my career is over, and we fight those emotions back and forth in our heads. When we’re actually in the moment creating the art, everything comes together and we know, deep down, we know it’s working. Later on, it all kind of falls apart, and so then we just wait for the book to come out, for the story to be seen, and wait and see what people say about it, and just hope that we were right.
That’s fantastic, Brandon. You sound like one of your own heroes, you know, wrestling with the mighty forces. [laughter]
Yes, well it sometimes feels a little bit like that way, you know, the underdog who comes in with this monumental task to do, I felt like I’m carrying that ring toward Mordor several times.
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